The Gawain Romances
late 14th–15th c.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Loathly Lady who knows what women most desire — the chivalric code tested to destruction on a single knight.
The English poems put the whole apparatus of chivalry on one man and see what breaks.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest of them. A green giant rides into Camelot at Christmas and offers a game: strike me, and take my stroke in a year. Gawain strikes off his head; the giant picks it up and rides out. A year later, lodged with a host whose wife tests him for three mornings, Gawain does everything right except one thing — he accepts and conceals a green girdle he is told will keep him from being killed. For what man soever is girded with this green lace, while he has it fastened neatly about him, there is no man under heaven who can cut him down. One concealment, out of ordinary fear of death. The oath had nothing to say about it.
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle inverts the whole question of sovereignty into comedy. Arthur must answer a riddle — what do women most desire — on pain of his life, and the answer, given by a loathly lady who demands Gawain in marriage as her price, is: to have the sovereignty, without lying, of all, both high and low. The right to rule moves from the throne to the marriage bed, and the poem thinks it is funny, and it is also entirely serious.
The strongest case for
*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* is the best poem in the Matter of Britain, and it locates the failure of chivalry exactly where the great cycles cannot: not in adultery or treason, but in a good man's ordinary wish not to die.
The standard objection
These are small poems beside the cycles, and the surviving texts are hard — one manuscript for *Gawain*, blackletter scans for the rest. It is easy to over-read a body of work that survives so thinly.
Only *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* is published here. The rest of the Madden volume — the Awntyrs, Golagros, the Carle of Carlisle — survives in an 1839 blackletter scan too rough to quote.
How it maps
Carries the fellowship (the code tried on one knight) and the source of rule (Ragnelle's inversion). Reads against Malory, whose Gawain is a different and angrier man.
Validated quotations
“Whate wemen desyren moste, in good faye, my lyf els shold I lese”
Syr Gawayne — the Madden romances, the riddle (Sir Gromer's demand)“We desyren of men, aboue alle maner thyng, to haue the soveraynté, withoute lesyng, of alle, bothe hyghe and lowe”
Syr Gawayne — the Madden romances, the answer